Thursday, December 12, 2013

Sewer Rat

No. No, no. No, no, no, no, no. Under no circumstances am I going to chase
this guy into the sewers. The woman he
attacked said he had claws! Do not go chasing after him, you moron!

Dammit all to hell…who runs into the sewers anyway? Seriously!

I look up and down the street to make sure no one’s going to
run me over while I’m not going into the sewers and trot over to the
still-dislodged manhole cover. I hear a couple
footsteps and then just the hum of a restless city.

Oh God, why do I
do these things?

I slide the cover over with my foot and feel my way down the
ladder. Ladder’s really a misnomer here,
it’s more like a few overly wide U-shaped metal rungs anchored into the
surrounding concrete and covered with foam padding that squelches when I squeeze
it. Oh, and covered’s also something of
a misnomer, turns out that when people walk on foam padding it tends to
deteriorate so the rungs are covered with foam the same way the Hulk is covered
by his pants.

My footsteps sound a lot louder than the other guy’s
had. I wonder how far sound carries down
here. Not far enough for me to hear the
other guy is all I can tell. Smell, on
the other hand, must travel for miles because I swear to God that I can smell
every bit of raw sewage packed in down here.
It must be able to travel through time as well—there’s no way I’m only
smelling today’s sewage. This has to be
the accumulated scent of a thousand years of sewage, past, present, and future.

I really hate myself for doing this.

Most of the light bulbs strung across the ceiling are
missing, giving the remaining bulbs a feeling of oases among the darkness. I pull my flashlight out and click it
on. I’ve heard this model’s prone to
dying out early, but until then it shines like someone shoved a supernova in
one end. The beam reaches a dead end on
my left, but can’t make out the end of the road to the right. Guess right’s the way to go.

My eyes are watering and my nose is burning, but I force
myself to take slow, methodical steps, keeping on the balls of my feet. I can’t stay perfectly quiet, but it’s better
than the hollow booms of my first few steps.
I flick the beam around the tunnel, looking for some sign of a
disturbance. My boot squelches worse
than usual and I gag on a painfully intense smell. I can’t bring myself to check what I just
stepped in and try to get as far away from it as possible before scrapping my
boot against the concrete ledge.

Something scrapes and clatters and I spin around, flicking
the light across the tunnel in front of me and back where I came, in case
whoever I’m chasing somehow doubled back on me.

Nothing. The only
thing I hear is my own rough, slightly panicked breathing.

Shit, that’s unnerving.

My hair’s standing up on end like someone’s watching me, but
odds are I’m just losing my nerve in the darkness. This is the part where I would normally (does
that word actually mean anything to me?) tell myself to take some deep breaths
and keep moving, but I’m worried that if I breathe too deeply I’ll inhale half a
dozen infections and die down here.

Skip
the breathing and just move, asshole.
Standing around talking to yourself isn’t doing much.

I don’t get very far before I hear another scrabbling
sound. It sounds like a giant rat
running across concrete. Giant and quick
and aware that I could hear it for a second because the scrabbling stops almost
immediately. My stomach’s a helium
balloon that some douche bag kid couldn’t keep a hold of and is now floating
around my abdomen. I stop. Pinching my nose helps with the smell enough
to let me take deep, slow, and most importantly quiet breaths. Someone turned up the bass on my heart when I
wasn’t looking and the thump, thump,
thump of it is starting to hurt my head.
I’m not willing to go so far as to close my eyes for concentration, but
I try and focus on everything I can hear down here.

My heart’s slamming around my chest. Okay, move on.

The occasional faint slosh of what I’m going to pretend is
just water. Tune it out.

A drip somewhere.
Ignore it.

A wheeze.

Something wheezed.
Something nearby wheezed. If that
guy had kept running once he got down here I shouldn’t be able to hear him
breathe no matter how hard I concentrate.
If I can’t hear his footsteps, I shouldn’t hear his breathing. Which means he’s not running away.

My heart’s beating so hard I’m gonna have a bruise on my
chest soon and my ears are starting to ring.
The flashlight’s beam is wobbling around because I can’t keep my goddamn
hands steady and my breathing’s not nearly as quiet as I’d like it to be
anymore.

Walk away! Walk away and leave this guy to someone
else. Drop the cops a tip and let the
professionals deal with this one.
They’ll bring floodlights down here and flush him out. They’ve got guns and the training to go with
them. Hell, they might even bring down
one of the Registered costumes that OPHR keeps on-staff.

Walking away is where the smart money’s at.

Running as fast as physically possible sounds
even better.

I ignore the sane, rational part of my brain and take
another couple steps forward, coming to a split in the tunnel. Keep going straight or veer off to the
right? I hear another scrabbling sound
to my right and turn in time to see someone hurl himself at me from the
ceiling. I have a second to recognize
that he’s a big guy and his fingers look awfully sharp before he hits me hard
enough to knock the flashlight out of my hand and the air out of my lungs. He tackles me to the ground and stars ignite
behind my eyes. I bring my arms up
around my head without thinking and feel him dig into the sleeve of my jacket.

Claws. He actually
has claws. Claws sharp enough to scrape
through leather maybe? God, I hope the
Kevlar holds.

I try to roll out from under him, but he’s a big guy and
every pound of him is pressing down on me.
I only manage to roll onto my side.
He starts cutting into the leather on my shoulder. I turn my face into the ground, try to ignore
the sewer water soaking my mask, and throw an elbow. It connects with something solid and he
shifts his weight a bit. Thankfully he
stops clawing at me for a second as well.
I roll again, this time getting my hands under his leg and lifting it as
I do so, and manage to get free. The
floor’s too slick to get any traction and I skid trying to get up to my feet, finally
catching a break. While I was rolling
and slipping, he was trying to hit me with another flying tackle and went
sailing over my head. He hits the wall,
falling into a harsh cone of light.

It’s
the first good look I’ve gotten of him.

He’s big. Like, prize
fighter a few years past his prime big. Beat to shit jeans and what was probably a white t-shirt at one point are the only
things that seem real about him. He
looks like a comic book villain. Ichy-Thump
disorder, or whatever that dry, scaly skin thing is, makes his skin look like a
cantaloupe rind. His finger nails are
thick and unevenly pointed like he’s filed them down that way. He bares his teeth at me and growls like a
fucking animal. His eyes are too narrow
and there’s something wrong with the lids, they’re red and irritated. The skin deal is one thing, but I can’t even
fathom why he’s acting this way.

He moves like an oversized dog, pushing himself on
all-fours. Two galloping steps and he’s
slashing at me again. I take it on the
forearm, hoping my jacket holds, and hit him in the mouth. He staggers back a step and growls again.

There’s something very wrong with this man.

Not that that changes how dangerous he is. Particularly because I think he’s realized
he’s not gonna get through my jacket very easily because his next slash is just
a feint and when I move to block it he slams his other fist up under my ribs.

Ow. Shit, ow.

My turn to stagger backward, but my defiant psycho-growl
sounds more like a groan. He keeps after
me, swinging at my head, stomach, and shoulder while I duck, sidestep, and
block. He overswings and stumbles
forward; I plant my foot on his shoulder and shove him over.

I don’t actually wanna hurt him, but he’s obviously violent
and I’m obviously gonna get my arm ripped off if I keep play-fighting with
him. Goddammit.

He lunges at me again, all animal-rage and
hyper-aggression. I don’t know if
this’ll actually work but supposedly it’s a good way to knock someone out. I also learned about it from a YouTube video
about Muay Thai so there’s a good chance I’m gonna get decapitated for trying
it. Either way, he’s giving me the setup
and I can’t turn a chance like this down.
I bring my rear leg forward, snap it back, and launch my whole body
forward. He only catches me with
glancing blows on my side and off-shoulder.
I catch him square on the jaw with the better part of 170 pounds behind
my fist. I think I hear his jaw break.

There’s no staggering, no growling, he just collapses and I
very nearly fall on top of him. I dance
around his sprawled body and crouch down immediately to check his pulse. I have to take my glove off and his skin
feels pretty freaky but I’m immensely relieved when I feel his pulse drumming
on.

Jesus Christ.

I fall over backward, barely noticing the cold filthy water
that’s soaking through my jeans. It
occurs to me that I haven’t even cable tied the temporarily incapacitated,
violently unstable sewer-man. I push
myself up off the ground and grab a pair of cable ties. With the adrenaline draining, I’m starting to
feel a bit less than sunny. My rib’s
tweaking, my arms and shoulder are bruised and throbbing, and the customary
comedown sickness are all making movement a monumental chore. I need to call the police in to deal with
this guy. Tell them to bring the non-lethal
gear. They never talk about this post-dustup shit in the
comics.

I reach into my inside pocket
and hope I didn’t break another phone.
It’s just a burner but I can only afford so many. Thankfully, it comes out in one piece and none of the
important buttons are missing.

9-1-1

The operator answers quickly, calm and professional. I tell her he’s not well, that he needs
help. I wonder if she’ll actually pass
the message along. I have absolutely no idea how the
police decide who to actually take seriously, they’ve gotta get prank calls out
the ass. Kids claiming to be a costume
that just busted a bank robbery up or crazies thinking they’re Batman. Better them than me. I’d lose my shit.

This guy’s heavy enough that picking him up really aggravates
my everything. Picking conscious people
up is one thing, picking unconscious people up is something else entirely. Lots of dead weight distributed over almost
six feet of body makes it hugely awkward.
There has to some trick to this that I don’t know. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna try and haul
him up to the street, so I drop him at the foot of the ladder. Anyone looking down the manhole won’t be able
to miss him.

Up the ladder (ribs and shoulder muttering mutinies all the
while) and out onto the street and it hits me how exhausted I am. My phone tells me it’s 3:17am. I yawn.
There are two ways to guarantee a yawn:
watch someone else yawn or check the time after two in the morning. I rub my eyes, ignoring the seam of my glove
scratching uncomfortably against the bridge of my nose.

I really don’t wanna be standing around in the middle of the
street when the cops show up. Costume
vigilantism isn’t all that legal. I also
really wanna be home and in bed. Winter’s
gone, but it hasn’t been a terribly warm Spring.

And yet for some stupid fucking reason I’m
climbing a nearby fire escape instead of skipping home. I stop at the third story and wait.

Apparently, the police aren’t nearly as
worried about prank calls as I am because they show up pretty promptly. One cruiser rolls up and two cops step
out. They’re both strapped with tactical
armor around their upper bodies and bright yellow taser guns on their
hips. That’s a good sign. One mutters something into his radio and the
other looks the street over like he’s expecting to find the suspect unbound and
foaming at the mouth instead of tied up at the bottom of a hole.

I lean back into the shadows a bit. One of them keeps checking the street for
free-roaming psychopaths while the other pokes his head over the open
manhole. He says something I imagine to
be along the lines of “Holy shit, look at this!
There’s a dude in the sewer!” and his partner stops checking the street
and jogs over.

It suddenly occurs to me that they might have some trouble
getting the guy out of the sewer as well.
And that’s only if he hasn’t woken up and decided to be
uncooperative. Normally, the slapstick
humor of two people struggling to carry around a flailing burden of a person
would be nothing short of delightful, but this whole deeply disturbed human
being aspect of it is sucking the fun right the hell out of everything.

Maturity blows.

****

It took them a second car with two more cops in it to haul
the guy out of the sewer and by the time they got him to the street he was
awake and fairly disagreeable. Seemed
more scared than angry or defiant though. If I
could get all four of their badge numbers and drop them all glowing words of
praise without including somewhere in there that I was the masked vigilante
that called them in the first place, I would.
Nobody’s laying into him with nightsticks or screaming at him with guns
drawn wondering “why the hell isn’t he responding to my clearly-worded and in
no way panic-inducing demands?”. The
ties are holding and the cops have added a set of their own handcuffs and though
everyone’s hands drift to the grips of their tasers from time to time, things
look surprisingly solid.

I make my way up the fire escape and start in the general direction
of the forest preserve.